Client testimonials are the most important thing

Photos have to make people say wow

Photographs are the basic tool for communicating in the luxury sector and their aim is to make people dream. That is why they are fundamental in communicating the brand's positioning. They should be spread across the website, the blog, social media adapted to the context, and email marketing.

Ours are emotional photos instead of the usual technical product shots, photos that make the client looking at them say “wow”. From that wow, the mental processes that lead the client to want the brand start to kick in.

A video strategy

It is essential to have a video strategy, and it is essential that the videos have the same quality as the photos: a quality kitchen needs quality videos. Formats should be split into different series, as on a well-run YouTube channel, and product videos are a must, which you can also use on the website and the blog.

Every product must be filmed as well as photographed, with different formats for the same product. We have a 17-minute video with a person explaining the product, and then a minute-and-a-half video of the product alone, with no people: so there is a video for those who want to watch all 17 minutes and one for those who want just one. Every showroom must have its own video. Every trade fair, every event must be documented with a report; if you look closely, even the microphone changes in the reports, the “ice cream” one that looks very TV: here too the visual matters.

You have to respect your potential client's preferences. Give each of them the format they prefer, photo or video: what matters is reaching them.

Testimonials

I learned to use client testimonials on a sales course in 2014, and years later I can say they are the single most important thing for building trust in the brand. The more client testimonials you have, the more they bring in other clients, whether those clients are well known or not.

Who watches ten minutes of an interview with a consumer who has bought a new kitchen? Only someone interested in buying a new kitchen.

I have testimonials with hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. One client, an industrialist from Modena whose chalet in Trentino we furnished, left us a testimonial in which she says her kitchen is her pride, her reason for living, and that her friends envy her. Testimonials like this make the market perceive that the brand has a base of enthusiastic fans. It works for a kitchen manufacturer and it works for a school: today Luxury Academy has 83 public video testimonials from business owners and 65 Google reviews averaging 5.0, and they are the first thing people look at when they are considering signing up for a course.

The next step on from the testimonial is the talk show: the prestigious client, the architect who designs with us more than once, we invite them to a small lounge set and make an episode with them. Then they share it with their contacts and put it on their website, but the video stays linked to our channel: their clients who don't know us see us too. We gain in recognition and in prestige.

An architect from Rome we work with was a guest on one episode. He shared it with his contacts and put it on his website, but the video stays linked to our channel: his clients, who didn't know us, saw us from there. And his colleagues, as I put it in one word in class, are green with envy. A product video got 7,000 views in a week. A client walked into the shop with a printout of the blog article on bathtubs: he was looking for a bathtub, and we sold him the kitchen as well. These are things competitors who sell through distribution cannot do, because the client isn't theirs.

YouTube, not Vimeo

How should the videos be distributed? You have to make use of YouTube, the second-largest search engine in the world. At the start we went with Vimeo, which looked more upmarket, but with Vimeo you only create embedded views: you bring traffic to the video from people who already know you. With YouTube the potential client can subscribe, gets a notification when you publish, it does SEO for you because it belongs to the Google family, and YouTube recommends your video to clients in target on the platform. If you type your brand name into Google, you don't just get descriptions but also videos with thumbnails.

The videos should then be recycled on the website and the blog, adapted for social media and used in email marketing. Don't be afraid to use photos and videos in emails: they work better than plain text.

The inverted pyramid

Distribution follows the inverted pyramid model. The starting point is the main piece of content: the long video, the talk, the testimonial, the product video, the completed project. It is then repackaged into different formats to reach as many users as possible with the least effort: the long video on YouTube and the website, the short vertical formats for Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, the blog article and the email to the list, which are owned platforms. And the audio of the main content becomes the podcast: nobody sits in a studio to record, you use the audio from the talks, leaving out the videos that refer to something you have to see.

In an ideal world you make a different video for each platform; for an SME it is fine to edit the main video in different ways, as long as you respect the identity of each platform. At this stage the focus shifts from producing content to distributing it. You pay for the video once and, distributed well, it works for years.

From my book Direct from Milano and my classroom courses. Figures and examples updated to September 2026.